The Nameless Horror

I’ve been away for a couple of weeks and managed to catch up on some reading. Chief amongst this was Andrez Bergen’s WHO IS KILLING THE GREAT CAPES OF HEROPA?. Rarely for me, this is timely (I think the book released early to Amazon last night), and here’s a review.

First, a quick aside: Andrez is very good at getting books into people’s hands ahead of time without coming across as a spammy bell end. People should learn. He’s also a very nice guy and a fine writer. I very much liked THE TOBACCO-STAINED MOUNTAIN GOAT and was enjoying 100 YEARS OF VICISSITUDE until a pile of other stuff swallowed my time and I sort of dropped out of reading it about a quarter of the way through. No fault of the book; I’m just lousy at returning to stories I’ve had to leave for a month or so.

HEROPA is a superhero crime novel with SF elements in the way that INCEPTION has SF elements (hand-wavy background setup rather than heavy story pieces). It’s also easily his most accessible book, and for my money his best.

I had only two minor quibbles with it. Let’s get them out of the way. Firstly, (MINOR SPOILER OF AN EARLY REVEAL) in the real world - Heropa is a plug-your-body-in MMO in which you die if you die, the body cannot live without the mind and all that - Jack is 15, but in stretches he comes across as older. (END MINOR SPOILER) And secondly, the ending was a bit abrupt for me; I’d have liked a little coda chapter, something to wind down.

And that’s it. The second is purely a matter of my personal taste and the first is a tiny thing that made absolutely no difference to my enjoyment of the story; Jack, like Brick, Pretty Amazonia and all the others, is a genuinely engaging character who you want to see come out of things OK.

The story starts off similar to the first POWERS arc, WHO KILLED RETRO GIRL?, but soon branches off into something more sinister, as well as going more and more into the relationship between Capes and Blandos. Jack gets involved - in a touch of the GROUNDHOG DAYs, also neatly done - with a Blando, Louise, and their relationship - and the traditional powers-with-civvies conflicting personal loyalty - is key to the later part of the book, and rightly so.

I don’t want to go too much into the story so let’s wrap up. I very much doubt I’ll read a supers novel better than HEROPA, but it’s also primarily, like the aforementioned POWERS, a crime story at heart, and has plenty of emotional character draw and soul to it, as well as being a lot of fun. I really, really enjoyed HEROPA, and I’d happily recommend it to anyone. Great stuff.

Those of you with longish memories might remember serial art thief and batshit crazy contract abuser Trestle Press and its unlikely-monikered owner “Giovanni Gelati”, otherwise known in real life as Michael Brachelli. The story ended with him apparently facing a lawsuit from one of his authors and folding the operation, at least temporarily, so he could focus on Amish novels (whose writers presumably either missed the shitstorm or didn’t think badly of him afterwards) under the name Helping Hands Press. Not, of course, to be confused with the other Helping Hands Press, founded in 1986 and still going. (Also note his classy use of a .org domain, traditionally for not-for-profits rather than actual businesses.)

Author Anne McDonald emailed me earlier this year asking if I’d heard any more of the story and what had become of the lawsuit. I hadn’t, but she was digging into it. Now (she posted in a comment on the last Trestle piece I wrote, but it deserves lifting out on its own) she’s found out exactly what happened, and you should go and read the whole thing over on her blog - the details are many and varied.

(Edit to add: and here’s Luis Vera’s quick rundown. Luis was the one who broke the cover art theft practice in the first place.)

So not only are the original Helping Hands Press understandably miffed that he’s using their business name, “Gelati” also failed to defend the suit - in fact, failed to respond at all - and has been landed with $750,000 in damages plus costs, as well as the author getting their rights back.

Not just a villain, but an incompetent one.

• Do you think self-publishing has been a good or a bad thing for the market and its readers?

With a couple of caveats, a good thing. More choice, by and large, is always good, and it’s nice that work that would maybe have been rejected by traditional publishing not because it’s bad but because it doesn’t fit an obvious commercial niche has an outlet. There’s some very good self-published work out there which would never have found an audience a few years ago, and having an audience allows its writers to write more. Which is undoubtedly cool.

The first caveat is that, in the early gold rush days at least, there was a mindset amongst some self-publishers that it wasn’t important to polish your work, or worry about improving your writing over time; you could get it finished and put it out there and ‘the market will decide’. That’s obviously a poor attitude to have to your own work in any case, but moreover it led to a glut of unremitting shite being dumped on would-be readers. That was definitely not a good thing for readers, was poor for the reputation of self-publishing as a whole, and I suspect (your mileage may vary here) the tarring-everyone-with-the-same-brush rep self-publishers gained for lack of editing, poor technical standard of writing etc. probably made the us vs. them, self vs. traditional pissing matches that developed worse. Quality self-published writers felt they needed to fight their corner because otherwise perfectly pleasant people made the assumption that their work must be lousy because otherwise why self-publish? That attitude has diminished, I think, now; I’ve certainly not seen anyone advise a fling-shit-at-the-wall-and-some-will-stick approach for a good while. Self-publishing has become much more professional and focused on quality. But we could maybe have avoided a lot of unnecessary arguments back then…

Very busy with a book and a magazine. (Freelancey job thing, the latter, not anything terribly exciting unless discussion of maritime sulphur emissions rocks your socks.) Consequently, all rather quiet here. By way of an ‘I aten’t ded’ message, here’s a shot of one of nature’s most elusive and busiest targets taken this morning.